In the Los Angeles Times, an article about an aerospace industry boom of sorts in Southern California, involving new twists on an old technology: airships. Who’s buying? The military, and other government agencies, primarily for defense and surveillance purposes.
via Boing Boing

Read More → "An airship boom in Southern California"

Do you like to think about how cool it would be to fly? A group of researchers at Zhejiang University in China has developed a way to harness those thoughts, turning them into control signals for a real flying Quadcopter.

FlyingBuddy2 is a camera-equipped quadcopter that can fly over objects, capturing pictures and video from a unique perspective. A series of basic thoughts control its movements, while specific actions like blinking four times will activate the camera. To control the ‘copter, the brain-generated signals are read by headset and transferred via Bluetooth to a laptop, … Read More → "Mind-controlled quadcopter turns thoughts of flying into reality"

Add “controlling your bike” to the list of things the iPhone does now. The computerized KICKR Power Trainer, announced this week, connects to an iOS app that controls resistance. That means you can simply tap your screen to simulate climbs, descents, and flats. Even better, you can use apps like TrainerRoad or Kinomap Trainer, which feature GPS-tagged videos of popular cycling routes around the world, to replicate real-world rides while you follow along … Read More → "iPhone-controlled bike trainer gives you real-world workouts in place"

Some of the companies really pushing driverless cars can be found in California, including Google. Google is one of the biggest supporters of driverless cars and has a fleet of vehicles that have racked up over 300,000 accident-free miles while driving themselves. The state of Nevada already allows driverless cars to operate on its roadways.

California didn’t want to fall behind and lose its high-tech edge and supporters in the state have been pushing to get driverless vehicles approved for use on public roadways within California. The California state legislature has … Read More → "California approves bill allowing driverless cars on state roadways"

Touching and finger-swiping are the dominant method of navigating on hundreds of millions of smartphones and tablet computers. The same touch might soon confirm your identity, too.

A new device dispatches a few bits of data, representing a password, from a special ring on your finger and sends the data as tiny voltage bursts through your skin for capture by the screen of the phone, so that your touch alone identifies you by the code from the ring.

Depending on the application, this could allow rapid switching between settings of people who share the … Read More → "This touch screen knows your touch"

You may recall that inventions like the microwave and Play-Doh were mere happy accidents. And of course you’ve heard of Alexander Fleming’s penicillin jackpot. But there are so many more scientific breakthroughs that came about through sheer dumb luck that you may not have heard of.

Here are nine of our favorites, including a few that you use every single day.
via Gizmodo

Many of Steven Millhauser’s best stories are wonders of historical futurism. He is interested in the road not taken, in what might have been, whether it’s a frighteningly interactive form of painting (“A Precursor of the Cinema”) or a bodysuit that simulates any tactile experience (“The Wizard of West Orange”). If you like steampunk or sci-fi, if you like Christopher Nolan or Rian Johnson–really, if you like PopSci–you owe it to yourself to … Read More → "Steven Millhauser, short fiction’s greatest historical futurist"

This morning Hans Nyberg sent me the most impressive panorama I’ve seen of Mars yet, made from images released by NASA on August 27. Put it at full screen and look around. It’s just like being right there, but with oxygen and air conditioning.
via Gizmodo

Read More → "The best Mars panorama yet looks just like Earth"

Cutting-edge technology has a way of aging and trickling down into consumer products. This is particularly true in technology and materials intended for space travel. Ford has announced that it is using a superalloy that was developed for space shuttle engines in the turbocharger for its 2.0-liter turbocharged EcoBoost engine in some applications. The super alloy allows the turbocharger to last significantly longer than using normal metal alone.
via < … Read More → "Ford uses rocket engine alloy for superior turbos"

Camera lenses might look radically different in a couple years thanks to a new technology developed by a group of physicists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

Using a very thin wafer of silicon the scientists have created a flat lens that is only 60 nanometers thick and does away with the normal aspherical glass we’re used to seeing on most cameras.

“Our … Read More → "New flat lens could revolutionize cameras as we know them"